Weirdly shaped object can block out all sound (even your colleagues chattering)
A new shape can ‘cancel’ out sound so effectively that researchers attached a loudspeaker to one end of a PVC pipe – and the other end was silent.
The object, which was 3D printed to mathematical specifications to ‘cancel’ sound, can block 94% of sound – leaving it inaudible to the human ear.
It could lead to new ‘sound baffles’ which could be used in offices, for example, to drown out the rumble of chattering co-workers – or to block the noise of equipment such as air conditioning.
The hi-tech muffler was made using a 3D-printed ‘acoustic meta-material’ designed to block certain sounds in the pipe.
‘The idea is that we can now mathematically design an object that can blocks the sounds of anything,’ says Boston University professor Xin Zhan
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Two engineers created a 3D printed plastic shape, mathematically designed to cancel out sound.
When attached to the end of a pipe with a loudspeaker blasting out a high-pitched noise, it silenced it like a mute button – until one researcher pulled it free and a horrible shriek came out.
‘The moment we first placed and removed the silencer…was literally night and day,’ says researcher Jacob Nikolajczyk.
‘We had been seeing these sorts of results in our computer modeling for months–but it is one thing to see modeled sound pressure levels on a computer, and another to hear its impact yourself.’
